


machines of futility

by addandsubtract



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Future Fic, Unhappiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-11
Updated: 2013-10-11
Packaged: 2017-12-29 02:11:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/999643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/addandsubtract/pseuds/addandsubtract
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She sinks her teeth into the meat of his pectoral and holds on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	machines of futility

**Author's Note:**

> written for [a prompt](http://postoperation.tumblr.com/post/63702390912) given to me by [m](http://littlevisibledelight.tumblr.com), on my [tumblr](http://postoperation.tumblr.com). pretty experimental for me. warnings: unhappiness, menstrual blood?

**One.**

She sinks her teeth into the meat of his pectoral and holds on. They’re blunt, her teeth, but she’s blunt like this. Giving her meaning away clearly with her body. The slant of a shoulder in anger. The arch of a neck, contemptuous. The narrowing of eyes and staring gaze. He holds still and lets her chew.

There are marks on his spine, the inside of his arms, the swell of his ass. She left them there for him.

“If killing him meant saving humanity, could you do it?”

She sits back on her haunches and considers him. The sheen of sweat sticking his hair to his forehead, the lose sprawl of his limbs. The slightly uneven draw of his breath. He is taut, concave, and at her mercy. He is where he likes to be.

“Not unless leaving him alive would condemn humanity,” she says, but she isn’t sure. Not sure she could at all, if it came down to it.

He would in an instant, she knows. He would cut her brother’s throat and watch him bleed into the dirt. It is, grudgingly, what she likes about him. She would still kill him for it.

 

**Two.**

The moon’s cycle rides in her bones, the push/pull of it making her ache, making her hurt, bleed. She wonders, not for the first time, if the monstrous can smell. Can they smell her?

He does, when he noses his way into her lap. Her pants are folded on the chair by the door, a concession to him, but she is still wearing her bra and panties, the wadded up cloth female soldiers use to make do lining the inside. She wants to bleed onto his sheets, let him know the power of her. Maybe she will. She remembers her mother telling her tales of when women could turn into beasts on the nights of their flow, and she wishes for it. She wishes for sharp teeth, and claws, but she is savage enough.

He pushes his nose against cotton and sighs. She could make him lick into her, get his face red all over, and he’d do it. For now she tugs his hair, turning his head, pushing her fingers into his mouth. His tongue curls around them, but no teeth nip at her. She won’t sleep here, but she’ll rest.

 

**Three.**

The woods are thick with them. They smell like rotting meat and swamp plants, thick and pungent, even as their footsteps shake the ground. She is flying, her hair long enough to pull back, now, watching her compatriots snatched from the air and split open and swallowed whole while she kills and keeps killing. She is covered in blood, none of it hers, but some of it theirs, the monsters, and some of it theirs, her soldiers. She will tell herself that their death has meaning, but the second wall has been gone for seven months and forced conscription means fodder for endlessly hungry mouths. Fodder to be swallowed down and vomited back up. Endless, useless death.

If nothing else, she is better at killing.

After, he finds her wiping blood off of her face with the back of her wrists, and he says nothing. She is even rank with him, and it means nothing. They are nothing.

Upon their return to the compound, uncelebrated, she will let him pull her toward the baths, because she is considerate enough, at times, to let the things that matter to him matter to her.

 

**Four.**

In the early morning, before the sun begins to pink the edges of the sky, they are on the roof. They have seventy-two bodiless funerals at dawn, but neither of them sleep the day before the funerals. They never do.

She has his pants pulled down to mid thigh, one hand in his hair, forcing his eyes to stars as she rides him. She could make him count them, out loud. She could make him name them. He has his hands behind his back, and she rubs her breasts against his chest, the buttons pricks of cold against her skin. He says her name like dying, and she sinks down onto him, her pace brutal, savage the way she is. She could be a monster if she wanted to be.

His cheekbones stand out in sharp relief, and she wants to make him cry. She might do it. She pushes one hand down between her legs, tells him what she’s doing, but doesn’t let him watch. She comes, biting her noises into his neck, but it will be a long while before he does.

 

**Five.**

After, after all the walls fall and it’s gone, after everything, all of it is gone, they find the house a pile of rubble and ancient fire. Just the three of them, and none of them fed. None of them assuming to live much longer than the hours it takes for dawn to come.

Her brother keeps his fists locked over his stomach, and stands in the barren room underneath the house where he’d seen his mother devoured. She can tell he’s crying, even though his shoulders are still, and there are no sounds. She can always tell. The room is sharp and bright with broken glass, the torch in his hand illuminating the shards of it. She wants to cut her feet open on all the answers they will never find, now. All the answers that were supposed to be here, and aren’t.

The hand on her shoulder is certain, fingers she remembers breaking and setting, fingers she remembers putting her tongue on. She’ll turn to him in a moment, she thinks. She watches her brother’s back, stiff straight lines of sorrow. She thinks that maybe, maybe she should have killed him.

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he says, mouth close to her ear. His breath is warm, but it’s mostly for her brother’s sake. “It wouldn’t have changed anything.”

They failed, but how could they do anything else, really?


End file.
